#2 - JRL 8156 - JRL Home
Date: Thu, 08 Apr 2004
From: Brian Taylor <briantaylor@ou.edu>
Subject: Re: 8155- Panktatov/ Spy Stories

This is in response to Kirill Pankratov’s note on the Sutyagin case.

First, the case of Edmund Pope is completely irrelevant to the Sutyagin case. If there is such a thing as “guilt by assocation,” then this is “guilt by lack of association,” because no one has claimed, or provided any evidence, that Sutyagin had anything to do with Pope. Pankratov surely knows that, so the issue is irrelevant.

Second, like the judge in the Sutyagin case, Pankratov does not even mention the key issue: Sutyagin had no access to classified materials. In what sense is distributing publicly available information “spying”? If I give someone a copy of Richard Clarke’s book, or the D.C. phonebook, and it later turns out that person works for a foreign intelligence service, exactly what crime am I guilty of?

Pankratov states that Alternative Futures was obviously an intelligence outfit, and implies that Sutyagin must have known that. Specifically, he writes: “What is of little doubt, however, is that the knowing, unauthorized cooperation with a foreign intelligence service would get one in trouble in any country, not only in Russia.” But it is not obvious that this is in fact a crime “in any country” (see the phonebook example). Further, from the available press coverage, I do not know that it has been definitively proven that Alternative Futures was an intelligence outfit. Although there are the suspicious elements to the story that Pankratov notes, it as at least plausible that they were a commercial outfit, perhaps subcontracting for a larger firm, involved in military industry. The fact that they disappeared, or that Pankratov thinks their business card looked strange, is hardly definitive proof. Most important, however, is that Pankratov leaps from “they must have been an intelligence outfit” to Sutyagin’s “knowing, unauthorized cooperation.” How exactly does Pankratov know that Sutyagin “knew” that Alternative Futures was an intelligence operation? If Alternative Futures was an intelligence outfit, ignorance, or perhaps even naivete, are equally plausible explanations for Sutyagin doing contract work for them. Contracting work, I have to repeat, that involved NO classified information.

Although it is irrelevant to the facts of the case, I did meet Sutyagin once at the Institute of USA and Canada. He obviously knew a lot about Russian defense policy, and my specific area of interest, civil-military relations. In fact, the FSB tried to claim at one point that the work Sutyagin had done on a report on Russian civil-military relations for a Canadian academic research institute also constituted spying. Regardless, knowing a lot about a topic based on a reading of the public literature, and being willing to interact with foreigners interested in the same topic, is not, or should not be, a crime. And it is not “ridiculous” to point this out “in no uncertain terms,” despite Pankratov’s protestations to the contrary.

Brian Taylor
Department of Political Science
University of Oklahoma.